Archive for Miscellaneous

One of the most popular articles I’ve posted on the blog was the one on salaries in the games industry from back in 2008. What made the article extra interesting was that I mined the public H1-B visa database for games companies. Unlike salary surveys, where people can claim arbitrary wages (and the submitted salaries are never posted), the H1-B data contains actual wages! In other words, it is a rare opportunity to get some objective data points on industry salaries.

Since some time has passed since I posted the article I thought it would be interesting to repeat the process, which I did, and here are the results. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to get 10+ spam user registrations every day on this blog. Not a total flood, but very annoying nonetheless. Today I get none! All thanks to a few lines of code I hacked into wp-login.php. Wanna know how? Read on. Read the rest of this entry »

As many have probably noted, I haven’t had much time or energy for updating this blog in quite a while. To rectify this I thought I’d make an effort to at least share the many interesting links that I’ve gathered since I last posted. In fact, there are so many links that I probably have to do this in parts. Let’s start with those relating to tools, process, and software. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s SIGGRAPH 2008 time! That’s exciting to me, but not for the reason you think. I really couldn’t care much less for the conference itself. I mean, who needs to hear about yet another shadow mapping algorithm, when we know there will be another 10 presented in the next year, and 10 more in the year after that, ad nauseum. I’m not particularly thrilled about going to paper presentations when just about every paper is already on the net, neatly collected and categorized on Ke-Sen Huang’s amazing conference index page. All the cool people I like to hang out with go to GDC and not SIGGRAPH so there’s not much in terms of networking. And the classes at SIGGRAPH just put me to sleep with their academic droning, overall lack of excitement, and no understanding of who actually attends their lectures and what they want to hear. Ugh. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re reading this blog, other than clearly being a person of integrity and impeccable taste, odds are you’re a programmer. As such, I thought I’d take the opportunity to mention that we have a few really nifty programmer openings on the God of War III (PS3) team that could just be the perfect thing for a nifty person like yourself.

The positions we’re hiring for are graphics programmer, tools programmer, and online gameplay programmer, and the key qualifications are that you have your head screwed on the right way (i.e. counterclockwise, and very tightly) and have the appropriate experience and skills in one of these areas (other qualifications listed in the job descriptions). While these are all senior positions, we might just make exceptions for young or inexperienced people if they’re sharper than a tack.

We’re a pretty cool bunch of people (at least, our 100% retention rate on programmers suggests we are) who work on some pretty cool high-profile games and, honestly, you could do much worse than decide to work with us.

We also have a position open for a build engineer. At the most basic level this position involves being responsible for making, testing, and deploying builds to the team on a regular basis. What we’d love to see is an talented and enterprising individual who would completely take charge of our build and test machines and their scripts, and help take the process and its automation to the next level. And more! It’s all up to you! This is a great entry position for someone fresh out of college with a CS degree (or similar) to break into the industry (or, if you’re already in it, to switch gears into a new career).

If you’re at all interested in any of these positions, send me an email or a resume. Discretion guaranteed, of course. Finding my email address is your first (not very hard) interview test!

Information about other jobs (artist, animator, designer, producer) available at our Sony Santa Monica studio can be found listed in the SCEA jobs database.

So, the reason I haven’t blogged in quite a while is that I had my external HD crash on me; said HD containing, amongst other things, my scribbles on things to blog about that might hopefully be of value or interest to people. While it turns out I didn’t lose any data, thanks to some luck and the friendly IT guys at work, it still made me reluctant to plug the HD back in until I had sorted out a reasonably reliable backup solution. You see, I had been bad and, ehrm, well, didn’t have any backups for my PC hard disks! And I bet you too probably don’t have a backup solution for your machine, dear reader! Tsk, not good. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you when your HD crashes. And it will crash, it’s just a matter of time! Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to my new blog. Some may have noticed that updates to the http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/ website were very infrequent, to say the least. By installing a standard solution for blogging (WordPress) my hope is that I will be better able to share some (hopefully) interesting comments with the world.

Of interest in this update is that I’ve added an article that revisits the topic of combining absolute and relative tolerance comparisons into a single test. This article expands on the coverage in both my book as well as my coverage in the GDC presentations on numerical robustness.